Linndale, Ohio
Near Cleveland, Ohio
If you ever got a speeding ticket on Interstate Seventy-One near Cleveland and wondered how a village this small had a police force this large, you found Linndale. The village is five blocks long and two blocks wide, home to about one hundred people and covering barely a tenth of a square mile. Interstate Seventy-One passes through for just four hundred twenty-two yards.
For decades Linndale enforced a sixty miles-per-hour limit on that quarter-mile stretch and turned traffic tickets into roughly eighty percent of its annual budget, around one million dollars a year. The arrangement made it one of the most notorious speed traps in Ohio.
In December twenty twelve, Governor John Kasich signed a bill that dissolved Linndale's Mayor's Court, stripping the village of its primary enforcement mechanism and ending an era. The village kept writing tickets afterward, and later added speed cameras.
